But wait. The issue is a lot more complicated than the PsyPost headline suggests. Granted, it appears that one quick exposure to good fiction won’t create empathy. But that’s not the same as the benefits of a lifetime of reading.

…we found no significant advantage in RMET scores for literary fiction compared to any of the other conditions. However, as in Kidd and Castano and previous research, the Author Recognition Test, a measure of lifetime exposure to fiction, consistently predicted RMET scores across conditions. We conclude that the most plausible link between reading fiction and theory of mind is either that individuals with strong theory of mind are drawn to fiction and/or that a lifetime of reading gradually strengthens theory of mind, but other variables, such as verbal ability, may also be at play.

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Published by David Rothman

David Rothman is the founder and publisher of the TeleRead e-book site and cofounder of LibraryCity.org. He is also author of The Solomon Scandals novel and six tech-related books on topics ranging from the Internet to laptops. Passionate on digital divide issues, he is now pushing for the creation of a national digital library endowment.
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5 thoughts on “Reading good fiction DOES build empathy, even if one study hasn’t held up”

This already happens. When I visit the public library near me, I see parents checking out tall stacks of children’s stories for their kids. But then I live in a college town with excellent schools. White and black families move here for those schools. The Korean employees of a KIA factory 30 miles away commute from here, crossing a state line, to get those schools. And in that context, they teach their kids to enjoy reading.

But there are other contexts that don’t create that healthy environment.

1. Welfare programs make fathers useless and mothers on welfare don’t see any need for a good education, much less reading at home. That hits black people particularly hard. In 1965, 25% of black children grew up in single-parent households. Today over 70% do. Similarly growing rates among whites warn of still more ills for society.

2. Young men, whatever their race, growing up in fatherless homes turn to gangs and violence. No dad in the home doesn’t just mean no dad reading to them at bedtime. It means no dad countering those typical adolescent male stupidities.

3. Teacher unions fight tooth and nail any program that’d give poor families the same options that rich parents take as a matter of course. Very revealing, liberals are big on choice for black women when ‘choice’ means abortion. They come up very lacking when choice means where that same child goes to school. Could they be trying to force that abortion rate up? Of course. Eugenics was and remains a progressive cause.

4. A host of ethnic groups entered this country in a mess. Jews were extremely poor. The Irish were alcoholics. The Italians were violent. A century and more ago, all those groups were forced to form their own agencies to fix their ills and not merely cover them up with other people’s money. Blacks live in a different world. Welfare and those LBJ-era programs give the black middle-class an excuse to move far away and ignore the problems of the black poor, blaming those woes on “systematic racism.” No it isn’t. It’s the laziness and indifference of the black middle-and-upper class (and their religious organizations) not forcing their poor to adopt more constructive lifestyles—including intact families and stressing the importance of reading. And yes, there’s a white underclass with many of the same ills.

I could go on and on, but I’ve made my point. Reading programs for prisoners illustrates too little too late. It doesn’t address the real causes and it won’t even have that much impact on inner-city crime rates. Young criminals will have to cross a threshold of crimes committed before they enter these programs.

And I might add that all that dysfunction does benefit a narrow slice of America—those who are already very wealthy and who use large, corrupt governments to further enrich themselves in a practice called machine politics (at the city level) and crony capitalism (at the national level). They want a near-illiterate cadre of dysfunctional people angry and living in poverty as an easily manipulated voting block. Chicago, home of Obama, illustrates that all too well. So do the two Clintons. Never forget, there are very rich people who benefit from pay-to-play corruption. They’re the ones who can afford to pay to get influence.

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There’s also another factor in the impact of reading. I wrote My Nights with Leukemia primarily to convince nurses that working with kids who have cancer could have major benefits for their lives despite the emotional high risks. I did that because, when I told nurses about my work when I worked in the field, their typical response was, “I could never do that.” Over and over, I find that nurses and others who’d benefit from reading it are the very ones who shy away from it. Those who read it, I suspect, are already those who find high risk for high gain appealing. The book tends to reinforce rather than change.

The same is likely to be true for reading programs intended to teach empathy. They attract and retain those already so inclined. They’ll help, but they’ll only help those who want to be helped. They’re not the equivalent of an in-the-home father yelling at his gang-related son to get his life together and quit being so stupid.

@Perry: Italians were violent…wow. Well, I grew up in a single-parent home and I didn’t join a gang. I did, however, religiously go to my neighborhood library. I learned several languages and eventually taught one. A life of Reading should expand people’s horizons and help them overcome steretypes by reading about people who don’t fit the stereotype. That’s your lesson for today.

@Mike: Criminals in studies were told either to agree to the reading program or face harsher alternatives. So this wasn’t exactly volunteering in the strictest sense. And yet there was a big gap in recidivism rates between participants and nonparticipants. It wasn’t just the books alone. But if you look at the testimonials of graduates of these programs, it’s obvious that some very good things are happening. Of course, I’m all in favor of other anti-crime and anti-gang measures.

That includes encouragement of strong families. In regard to families of two married parents versus one-parent families, yes, I would agree with you in terms of the benefits for kids (unless there are extenuating circumstances, such marriage where the husbands and wives are constantly yelling at each other). Much better for social stability, kids’ academics, and their emotional stability in general.

@David: There is a difference between the results of a lifetime of reading and what the experiment focused on. So we can’t reach a final conclusion about lit vs. genre, as I myself see it. Of course, given the number of people who read and write genre fiction, it will be wonderful if nonliterary fiction can also be beneficial. What’s more, lines can blur between genre and lit.